Better Security
by kurgaya
Summary: IchiHitsu - oneshot - light humour - What if the 'Thousand Year Blood War' had been declared some hundreds of years later? Spoilers for chapter 482.


**Important:** **_Do not read_** if you haven't read chapter** _482_**. While light, there are spoilers in this drabble. (And you've kinda got to have read that chapter to understand the 'what if' anyway so...)

**Note:** What if the 'Thousand Year Blood War' (as I assume it is) had been declared some hundreds of years later? This is IchiHitsu, my attempt at light humour, and something that came to me earlier today :) A big thanks to Yellta, and with all that said please enjoy!

Oh, I quote the manga at times too, but I haven't made any indication as to where. Bleach is copyright of Kubo.

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**Better Security  
A 'what if' drabble**

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The first division haori felt heavy on his shoulders, like it always did. The chair he was slumped in was two decades too old, and the brush he dipped into the ink-pot beside his wrist two decades too new. Sakamoto, his ever loyal fukutaicho, had winced under the stare he received for his suggestion that he should take a break, and had quietly mumbled something about a report before being shooed away. That had been some hours ago now and even with the breeze drifting in past the pillars that had replaced the office's fourth wall, the taicho of the first division still found that he couldn't relax.

As much as he didn't usually admit it, it was far too quiet in his excessively large and empty office for him to get his head down and work. Many years ago the silence never would have bothered him, having a lazy-ass woman for a fukutaicho who never seemed to spend enough time around him to become a nuisance, but he had grown comfortable with the pointless blabber that came with having an orange haired idiot for a boyfriend that, without it, he felt like something in his office was missing.

Tōshirō Kurosaki (nee Hitsugaya) sighed, wondering why he was the leader of Soul Society, and put down his brush. He pushed at the table and scowled as his chair scraped across the floorboards, knowing he should have something done about it at some point, considering how much time he seemed to spend in his vast, lonely –

There was a group of people standing in his office.

Dressed in the whitest of white there were seven of them, their heights ranging from his (still pathetic) five foot something or other, to something one would only associate with the late Sajin Komamura. Their uniform, for they all wore exactly the same, struck Tōshirō as military, but it was the stark black masks they each wore that put him more on edge than anything.

"Who, are you?" he asked carefully, still half-standing from his seat.

"We meet for the first time, Captain-Commander of the Gotei 13, Tōshirō Hitsugaya-dono," said the one standing in the middle of the group, his voice smooth and formal, talking as if he were addressing somebody of a higher status than the little Kurosaki. "We came here... to declare war on you."

Tōshirō's mouth formed a thin line at these words, but because of the error in his name or the declaration of war he wasn't sure.

"However," went on the stranger. "I am surprised. It was easy to break into this room. Despite it being the office, or better, the personal room of the Captain-Commander of the Gotei 13. Isn't security... a bit too soft?"

He sounded like he was trying to make a joke and Tōshirō rose up to the challenge immediately. Much to the surprise of the white-cloaked scouts, he sat back down with an ungraceful 'flump' and kicked his legs up to rest on the desk. "Yeah well," he said casually, rotating his hand in a motion that he couldn't explain. "There's no need to worry, I've got the best security in the world."

The group did not seem unnerved, though Tōshirō couldn't be sure about that, their masks were a little obstructing of their appearances after all. "If you're waiting for me to say something over-exaggerated like, 'I am here. There is no better security than this' then you're out of luck, cause I can think of lots of things that would be able to protect me better than myself. It _is_ impossible to watch my own back, you know."

The temptation of adding, 'but you wouldn't know, since you can't even watch your own front' was great, but he managed to resist. There would be time to poke fun at their impractical masks later.

"I saw no guards," continued the same man.

"I don't need guards," said Tōshirō, and he pulled open one of the desk drawers and rummaged around for a while. The strangers were still as rigid and calm as ever, but the Captain-Commander took a bit of pleasure in watching one of them flinch at the sudden sound. They appeared rather interested in what he was doing, his hand stuck in a drawer with the threat of war hanging over his head, and Tōshirō eventually pulled out a round black stopwatch on a piece of string. He dropped it over his head and pushed the drawer shut, and then put his hands lazily behind his back.

"Come on then, do something. I've never had somebody declare war on me before."

The talkative one hesitated, and the largest and toughest looking of the group crashed to the ground in a spray of blood that splattered all over their uniforms. The six others had jumped away in a split second, and the talkative one cried, outraged, "You attack us _unprovoked_?"

Tōshirō shrugged and swung his legs down from the desk, almost knocking over the ink-pot in the process. He quickly tightened the lid and set the brush to the side, saying innocently as another of the seven found themselves thrown through one of the office walls. "You declared war - how else was I supposed to react? Sit here and talk you out of it? What _moron _would do that?"

Of course, it had to be noted that Tōshirō hadn't moved from behind his desk, and still the cloaked scouts were getting beaten to a pulp by something none of them could see. He stopped the timer once the room was silent again, the yells and the screams had slipped into the unconscious, and the Captain-Commander frowned at the number on the screen.

"That took you far too long," he snapped, taking the stopwatch off and throwing it to the orange haired taicho sitting on his desk.

"What?" Ichigo cried, insulted. "How did it - eleven seconds - _oh come on_! Give me some traveling time here!" He waved the watch in front of Tōshirō's face dramatically, his tone begging. "Make it nine."

"Eleven."

"Nine and a half?"

"Eleven- you take less time to get drunk, and I'm not very pleased with having a husband who takes longer to protect me than he does making a fool out of himself."

Ichigo huffed, placing the stopwatch down on the desk beside his husband's paperwork. He crossed his arms and began to sulk, catching the amused smirk on the other's face in the corner of his eye. "You don't need protecting."

The look he got told him that Tōshirō clearly wasn't buying it. "Then why," he said, leaning forward and resting his head on his hand. "Did you come to my aid?"

"Oh I dunno... perhaps because of the _declaration of war_?"

A grin spread across Tōshirō's facial features, and Ichigo realized his slip of tongue just a second too late. He flushed a bright red and turned away, ruining all chances of redeeming himself with his guilty actions. Tōshirō didn't say anything for a while, most likely trying not to snigger, but when he did Ichigo knew he was caught:

"You were on the roof _listening_, weren't you?"

There was no point even trying not to sound like a child caught stealing from the cookie jar. "So what if I was?"

He didn't expect the wad of paperwork on the desk to come crashing down on top of his head. But it did, and he tumbled off of the edge of the desk clutching his pounding skull. "Ow ow ow ow ow!" he shouted, rolling about on the floor. "What was that for?"

Calmly sitting back down like he hadn't just done that, Tōshirō re-stacked the paperwork into a nice neat pile and placed it where Ichigo had been sitting. Then he took a deep breath, and Ichigo cringed before the words were even out of his mouth, "It took you eleven seconds to get from the roof, to _here_? There isn't even a door to bypass you idiot!"

Opting to remain on the floor where his face couldn't be seen, the fifth division taicho grumbled a couple of profanities and then a half-hearted explanation that involved tripping over his haori and almost smashing his face against the roof tiles.

Tōshirō just sat there and listened, slumped in his chair like he had been for the whole afternoon, blatantly ignoring the seven bleeding and broken men lying in his office and thinking that, no matter how stupid and clumsy his husband could be, there really was no better security than this.

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**End Note:** Please review! :D


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